FRENCH POLICE AN INTRIGUING GROUP

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000100360029-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 1, 1999
• Sequence Number: 29
• Publication Date: January 30, 1966
• Content Type: NSPR

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Abduction of Ben Barka in Pa'ris'
o1lo1US eF ~e7
Of Dreyf its, Olhe ,,Sc r,ndals
By W(iverley Root
-ARIS-" can a s, an anonymous
philosopher wrote in the weekly
Express last week, "are to politics what
diseases are to the human organism:
inevitable. At least once a generation a
scandal becomes an 'affair'-the Drey-
fus Affair, the Stavisky Affair, the Ben
Barka Affair."
The nature of the scandal, the edito-
rial continued, reveals the particular
disease from which the affected regime
suffers-in other terms, what occult in-
fluences are running the government.
The Dreyfus Affair exploded under
the government because the army was
calling the tune. The Stavisky Affair
almost ended the Third Republic be-
cause money dominated that bourgeois
regime. In the Ben Barka Affair, this
country discovered with horror that
two of its own police officers had kid-
naped Mehdi Ben Barka, Morocco's left-
ist opposition leader, and delivered
him to gangsters allegedly hired by
.Moroccan Interior Minister Gen., Mo-
hammed Oufkir and apparently to his
death. This demonstrated that the poi-
son in the veins of the Fifth Republic
is the power of the police.
Laud of Intrigue
TOT THAT THE Fifth Republic is'
.IN unique in this respect. "France is
the favorite stamping ground for mys-.
terious organizations which, in partner-
ship with the power or behind its back,
exercise a decisive influence on events,"
wrote leftist Gaullist' Charles D'Ara-
gon, a former Deputy, in an article
which appeared in Le Monde by re-
markable coincidence on the same day
that policeman Louis Souchon broke
down and confessed 'that he had kid-
naped Ben Barka.
"Napoleon had his Barbouzes ('spe-
cial' police). The Restoration also. They
worked for the Tuileries (the Royal Pal-
ace). They worked for the Pavilion de
Marsan (Interior Ministry). Divergent
causes were defended with the same
arms. Nothing is more typical than the
manner in which the men of the Con-
gregation (church information agents)
a decisive influence on the future of
the regime and of Algeria. Few. states-
men have marked a' page. of history
with the seal of their will to a com-
parable extent."
In Napoleon's day, agents kidnaped
the Duke. of Enghien on Germah tej?ri-
tory and took him back to France`'for
execution.
THE EMPEROR NAPOLEON
From the Ern
to suffer from abuses of police power,
it is true that the turbulent history of
the epoch of Gen. Charles de Gaulle
has been marked. more strongly than
most by the imprint of police, 'particu-
larly of secret police-sometimes legal,
sometimes extralegal.
Before 1940, secret forces were most.
ly military. But when de Gaulle set up
his exile headquarters in London, the
acted alternately for and against the "need for eyes and ears in occupied
royal authority. Under the Fourth Re- France and the problems of directin
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WASHINGTON POST
AND TIMES HERALD
JAN 3 0 1966
coatttnzo
 WASHINGTON POST JAM b 0 !966
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CPYRGHT
ance movements required a secret po-
lice. Under Capt. Andre Dcwavrin,
whose alias was Passy, it became in-
volved in some exceedingly scabrous
episodes which were never revealed
because' it was wartime.
The same thing was happening on
the other side, where Vichy's police,
mostly anti-German, were serving the
regime in public and scuttling it in
private. The Resistance was getting in-
formation about Vichy plans from se-
cret documents taken from government
files by its owi employes.
Vichy secret police were involved in
the sensational escape from Koenigs-
berg of Gen. 1-Ienri Giraud, who for a
time shared the presidency of the pro--
visional French government based in
Algeria with de Gaulle. Whom they
weres really working for still is a mys-
CAPT. ALFRED DREYFUS
?ire to the Fifth Republic, France has
tery. So is the identity of the group
which organized the assassination in
Algiers of Adm. Jean Darlan.
Giraud protested to de Gaulle when
Jacques Soustelle was named head of
the provisional government's secret
services because he was a civilian.
"If that bothers you, I'll dress him
up in a general's uniform," de Gaulle
said.
Soustelle now is in exile for heading
a secret anti-de Gaulle group after hav-
ing helped bring de Gaulle to power
with a secret pro-de Gaulle group.
Soustelle's General Direction of
Special Services was the ancestor of
today's Service of External Documen-
tation and Counterespionage, the group
most deeply tarred in the Ben Barka
Affair. Moved from Algiers to France,
it became the General Direction of
Investigations and Reserach. There
might have been less need for it
if the Indochinese revolution had not
occurred. The name of SEDC came in
then before the Algerian war broke
out and created a need for still other
special services. It was the Algerian
war that fastened the most disreputa-
ble of French police forces on the
Fifth Republic.
The first group came from Algeria:
ADM. JEAN DARLAN
been afflicted by overzealous police and
Algerian born Europeans who were im-
ported into France to fight Algerian
terrorists. They inflicted upon France
-the shame of extensive police use of.'
torture. They were brought in because,
supposedly, they were experts in deal-.
ing with Algerians and insisted on do-
ing things their own way.
Then terrorism shifted sides. The
Europeans of the Secret Army Organ-
ization began to employ it and the of-
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ficial police, open and secret, turned
out to be useless. The sympathies of
too many of them were antigovern-
ment, Terrorists were tipped iii ad-
vance of actions planned against them.
The answer was the creation of special
police forces, more or less extralegal,
which were clubbed "barbouzes" (false
whiskers), a nickname given to secret
agents in the spy novels of Dominique
Ponchardicr, a former secret agent and
now French Ambassador to Bolivia.
The barbouzes were a`tough lot and
some were recruited from unsavory
backgrounds. There were a few Re-
sistance heroes among them, but there
were also toughs who had manhandled
their countrymen for the Gestapo dur-
ing the Occupation, and there were
simple criminals.
When the Algerian war was over, the
Al. least three persons connected
with the Ben Barka kidnaping are
suspected of having had something to
do with the Argoud case. One is
Georges Figon, a lawyer and possibly
the No. 1 nian in the Ben Barka Affair.,
Police found him shot dead and de-
scribed it as suicide, a theory which is
not finding universal acceptance.
Another is a gangster named Julien
Le Ny, alias Le Grand Dede, accused of
being one of,the criminals in Moroccan
pay who took delivery of Ben Barka
from the two French policemen who
kidnaped him. The third is Gaullist
Deputy Pierre Lemarchand, commonly
supposed to have been the chief of one
group of barbouzes during the Algerian
war.
But does the group still exist? The
French Bar Association seems. to think
so, for it has just opened a debate on
whether or not it is incompatible with
a lawyer's functions to direct' an extra-
legal police force. Figon said Lemarch-
and dined with a group of criminals,
some of them implicated to the Ben
Barka case, and told them that he ex-
pected to be named Secretary'of State
for Police in the new government, and
/that he then intended -to put them al
in jail-perhaps a warning to them t
leave the country.
A Well-Hated Alaii
- R - , , 0 '1'111 anti-Secret Army barbouze
of Jacques Foccart still exist.
Foccart, Secretary-General of d
Gaulle's Elysee Palace office staff,
assigned to handle African and Mada
gascan affairs, directed this clandestin
force during the Algerian war. But no
that the was is over, it ,may very wel 1 .
have been disbanded.
Antoine Lopez, the SEDC agent wh
is the No. 1 figure in the Ben Bark
case if Figon isn't, told a poiicema
whom he was trying. to enroll in th
affair that he was "covered" by Fo -
cart-or so the policeman says. Lop
has denied that he involved Foccar -
Foccart is one of the most hated me
in France in extreme right circles b -
cause his barbouzes were so effecti
in dealing the death blow to seer t
army terrorism, so no opportunity s
missed to smear him.
Whether the barbouzes still cxi t
as an organized force is not necc -
rarily significant in the Ben Bar
cas4..' The scandal is that regul r
Frene h police services were involve l.
Figon may' have started the affair, but if he did he had to call on the services
See BARKA, Page E4, Column 1
MEIIDIII-BEN BARKA
secret agents.
problem arose, "How do you get rid of
a barbouze?" One answer seemed to he
to use him for piecework-for instance,
the. kidnaping of Col. Antoine Argoud,
the Secret Army Organization leader,
from Germany. That episode had a cer-
tain resemblance to the Ben Barka A[-
fair. The supposition has always. been
that criminals did the job and obligingr-
ly deposited their captive, bound hand
and foot, in a delivery truck near po-
lice headquarters.
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AND T
BAItKA, From Page El
of Lopez of the SEDC, who knew that
the kidnaping was planned five months
in advance and helped to arrange its
details when it finally came off.
The SEDC is almost the exact coun-
terpart of the Amcricad~CIA. Its activi-
ties are restricted to the'-foxcign field.
It is an immense organization and -in-
habits imposing headquarters called the
Barracks of Tournelle. Its budget is
secret, and no one outside of a few
persons in the government knows how
much it costs. It is split into different,
often warring, divisions, separated from
one another by hermetic partitions. Its
agents have a habit of making policy
by undertaking, on their own responsi-
bility, acts that cannot fail to affect
national policy.
There can hardly be a better exam-
ple than the Ben Barka case, which has
embroiled an unsuspecting French
government with Morocco.
The two French policemen who kid-
naped Ben Barka last Oct. 29, accord-
ing to the accepted version. of what
happened, drove him to a suburban
villa and handed him over to a group
of thugs hired by Moroccan Interior
Minister Oufkir. Ben Barka supposed-
ly was murdered but there is no proof,
and no corpse has been found. The
only evidence that Ben Barka was
killed is the testimony of Figon, who
is dead.
Figon said he saw Oufkir torture
Ben Barka at the villa,.but Ben Barka
was moved to a second villa and.Figon
assumed he was then killed, but wasn't
present.
One theory circulating is that Ben
Barka was taken to Brest'and then to
Morocco by freighter and is now im-
prisoned.
The rivalries within the SEDC are
paralleled by those among the differ-
ent French. police forces, traditionally
hostile to each other except when they
have to band together when they get.
into a -bad bind. This may account for
several episodes in the present case.
For instance, did Lopez try to freeze
Figon out of the reported $140,000 the'
Moroccans were offering for, Ben
Barka by organizing the kidnaping
himself, and is that why Figon got
back into the act by taking a taxi to
the villa where two official.police cars
had conducted Ben Barka? Was' Lopez
arrested because the rival General In-
formation Service of the Paris Police
Prefecture was happy to pin something
on the SEDC?
To date, the following official police
services have been more or less tarred
in the case:
? The S'EDC, not only through Lo-
pez but through his superior, to whom
he had reported what was going on.
The SEDC was a more or less autono-
Involved told Frey's bureau chief about
it,
All of these individuals and services,
more or less fully informed about the
crime within a few days after It hap-
pened-and the SEDC months before
it happened-withheld what they knew
from the judicial authorities investigat-
Ing the case for ten weeks. They kept
much of it from De Gaulle as long as
they could-for Instance, the circum-
stance that French police were in-
volved-and even, it appears, from the
police commissioner working on the
case, who had to get his first precise
.leads from the Express, whose detec-
tive work brought it into the open.
Express is being sued by Papon on a
charge of libeling the French police,
along with the sensational weekly Min-
ute, a refuge for the, defeated die-hard
French Algeria faction - which, inci-
dentally, derives some of its informa-
,. tion from the connections retained by ,
mous organization reporting to Pre-
~
mier Georges Pompidou's office. De' one of its backers who was removed
Gaulle has now transferred it to the some years ago from the hand of one
army.
? The Judiciary Police, through its
Morals Brigade, which deals with nar-
cotics, prostitution, etc., from which
the two police.. kidnapers were recruit-
ed; through its Criminal Brigade,
which investigated the 'case, though it
seems' not to have been given informa-
tion which was in the possession of its
eriorsthrough its General Informa
su
of France's more accult official police
services, because he was becoming too
powerful.
Police 'Autonomy
HE INDEPENDENT power of the
French police accounts for the con-
siderable degree of autonomy they
often exercise, which makes possible an
operation'.stlch as the Ben Barka one,
p
tion Bureau, which had Figon's confess Which plunged the government into
sion two days after the crime and difficulties because police served a
through its ..two chiefs, to whom they . foreign power. without government
police kidnapers confessed five days..-knowledge.
later. The Judiciary Police are under . -There were several reasons for this.
the Paris Police Prefecture, and Pre- One which interested the individual
feet Maurice Papon also was informed actors was the money. Another, which
of what had happened within a few secured the go-ahead from superiors,
days of the kidnaping. was the "you scratch my back, I'll
? The Interior Ministry, which con- scratch yours" give and take common
trols the police throughout the nation, among secret services the world over.
became involved when Papon, whose This was intensified by the fact that
prefecture handles only the Paris Po- many operators are double or triple
lice, passed on his information to Inte- agents.
rior Minister Roger Frey, while others Rabat Is the headquarters for thej
s
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F each secret services working every-.
w icre in Africa. They therefore were
r ady to oblige Oufkir. Moreover, a
c uple of years ago, the Moroccan
s N-ct services returned one of
F ance's barbouzes, who was arrested
fr trying to blow up Ben Barka's
p edecessor as opposition leader. So it
as Morocco's turn to ask a favor.
Finally, Oufkir had worked in in.
t lligence when he was in the French
a -my and had cooperated with French,
a 'cnts in "Morocco when he headed the
IN oroccan secret police before becom-
i Interior Minister, so though it
seems unlikely, as some have spec-
u ated, that a Moroccan minister
could have been an out-and-out agent
o the French secret services, he was
n doubt on the -best of terms with
t em.
The antonomy of French police serv-
I es which permits them to carry on
Secret Aellons Have Been
Way o Life y Since Napoleon
private deals of the sort apparently
made with Oufkir stems partly from the
power of the information they have on
the most powerful men in the country-
including the politicians who are sup-
posed to be their bosses. Few of those
are completely secure from blackmail.
"You make a bad mistake in your
cduntry," I was told not long ago by a
man who knows the power of the
French secret police because he head-
ed one branch of it for several years.
"You leave your police heads in power
too long. We change them every five
to seven'years. It takes five years for
the top policeman to really learn all
he needs to know, but by the end of
seven, he knows too much. You have
-to get him away. from. those secret
files."
Thus the police become a law unto
themselves. Their primary ^interest is
to preserve their own position, - not
that a the governme
French ministry has found the police
dragging their feet because their zeal
for obeying the government was tem-
pered' by a desire not to get in wrong
with the next government.
At the time of the prewar Cagoulard
Affair,, when the determination of In-
terior 'Minister Marx Dormoy to get
at the top men behind extreme right
terrorisan so alarmed others that the
government resigned, a long cabinet
crisis seemed to be developing over
Dormoy"s desire to uncover the higher-
ups before a new government could
be formed. '
Dormoy lost, and he was bound to
lose. For the 'police, knowing that he
would not be their boss for long,
stopped executing, his orders. They
knew his successors intended to let a
few heads drop, and they did not care
to have their own included.
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